Saturday, December 01, 2007

I have been using it for a while now and love it. It has allowed me to keep up on things that interest me way easier and less obtrusively than ever before. Things like CAD tips, Formula 1 racing, automobile news, NFL news, tech new, airplane news, sailing news... You get the point.

Here is a typical shot of my reader...

It is showing the contents of my 'technology' folder which should probably be called gadgets. On the left under technology you can see all the feeds that I subscribe too that I have tagged with that. The ones in bold such as 'Crave: the gadget blog' have unread items and it shows how many in parenthesis.

Here come the beauty of the reader. If you look on the right side of the screen you can see all the headers of all the articles that are unread by me. Do I read all of these? Hell no! I can quickly scan the list and read just the ones that look interesting. 5 seconds to do what would take 5 minutes the 'old fashioned' way of navigating to a site, scanning through all the stories, then reading the interesting ones. I have 55 subscriptions right now and get around 400 new articles every week day. It typically takes me 30 minutes a day to clear that out. It's not work, it is comparable to newspaper time.

Lets say there is a blog that you enjoy reading, but the writer can be a lazy bum sometimes and won't post for long periods occasionally. Sound familiar? You old-skool peeps would would probably tire of clicking on said blog if it had a long drought. Eventually you would forget about it. Not so with the reader. It tirelessly checks often, I believe even multiple times an hour looking for updates. I have a blog of a fella that is currently sailing around the world. Often hell go weeks without posting because he is in the middle of an ocean. With out the reader I would have lost interest in his site long ago.

The final cool thing about the reader that I will tell you about today is the new 'Discover' button that you see on the left in the green area. It recommends other feeds that you may not have seen that may interest you by taking in account your reading habits, location and such. With the little that I have played with it so far, it does a good job.

Damn, one more thing that is slick. I you have a web enabled mobile phone, you can get to you reader over that and Reader will format it to read on you small screen. I was in Austin, Texas a few weeks ago with out a laptop (I have one on order...) and it was a great way to pass time.

I hope this encouraged you to swing by www.google.com/reader and check it out. As you can tell, I highly recommend it!